SCOT WALL: Remember: The Creator is the source of our rights

Published 5:00 am, Thursday, July 14, 2016

A Fighter Squadron 33 (VF-33) F-14A Tomcat aircraft heads for the setting sun during a flight off of the aircraft carrier USS AMERICA (CV 66).

A Fighter Squadron 33 (VF-33) F-14A Tomcat aircraft heads for the setting sun during a flight off of the aircraft carrier USS AMERICA (CV 66).

Photo: LCDR Ken Neubauer

SCOT WALL: Remember: The Creator is the source of our rights

1 / 2

Back to Gallery

Last week I finished this column by stating that “to believe that the Government or even the Constitution gives us our rights is dangerous and produces the kind of Executive orders we have seen, the laws enacted, and the decisions by the Supreme Court handed down.” And I said we would explore this more this week.

The two most important documents of the United States are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (along with the Bill of Rights).

No documents have had a greater influence on the founding and subsequent future of America than the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. The Declaration of Independence marked the birth of our republic and acknowledged our God-given “unalienable rights” to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Later, the Constitution outlined our form of government and defined the rights and the limitations of the government.

These documents are just as meaningful and important today as when they were written. The American statesman Henry Clay observed, “The Constitution of the United States was not made merely for the generation that then existed but for posterity - unlimited, undefined, endless, perpetual posterity.”

But today, we seem to move further and further away from operating under the wise and insightful boundaries that the documents provide and which led to the United States becoming the greatest nation of freedom on earth.

'Eat this, not that' this holiday season with Dr. Travis Stork from 'The Doctors'FoxLA

I am not sure if we, the people, understand and still “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed …”

This is oh so very important. Our Founders recognized that we have certain rights given to us by our Creator that the government is to secure for us, not give us. And this government is created by we, the people, and is for, we the people.

Our rights do not come from the government. Our rights do not come even from the Constitution. Read the Preamble to the US Constitution:

“WE THE PEOPLE of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

We the people established and ordained the Constitution. WE are the ones who created the federal government with its three branches. WE are the ones who gave the federal government permission to exist and told it exactly what it had permission to do, when WE assigned enumerated powers to each branch.

WE are the “creator” - the federal government is merely our “creature.”

This is exactly what Alexander Hamilton said in Federalist No. 33. “If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify.” (emphasis mine)

Now here is why this is so important. Article III, Sec. 2, clause 1, of the U.S. Constitution very specifically lays out the limits of the Judiciary and begins by stating, “The judicial power shall extend to all cases arising under this Constitution …”

So if we were to state that our rights come from the Constitution, then we are in effect giving federal judges power over our rights.

And when judges have power to determine our rights, our rights are no longer unalienable. But because it has been ingrained in us for long that our rights come from men or the Bill of Rights, rather than God, federal judges have seized on Art. III, Sec. 2, clause 1, to claim the power to determine the scope and extent of our rights!

So federal judges claim the power to regulate our political speech and religious speech. They claim the power to define marriage. They claim the power to take life away from unborn babies.

Why would the creator of the Constitution (us) grant to our “creature” (the government, and in particular the judicial branch of the federal government), the power to determine the scope and extent of our rights?

Now Playing:

It makes no sense. But this is what we continue to do when we don’t agree with and don’t hold up the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution that say our rights have a source — our Creator.